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It drives Will crazy how perfect Hannibal is—or, at least, how perfect he seems. Is there anything he can’t do? Anything he doesn’t know? Does he ever stumble or fumble? Is he ever inept or clumsy or vulnerable? Obviously the man is not actually perfect. But to Will, who is so painfully aware of his own shortcomings, for whom life feels like an unending succession of humiliating new struggles and failures, it's beyond infuriating to witness even the illusion of perfection.
It all begins to unravel the day he notices Hannibal’s lisp. It’s always been there, but until now, it has remained just beneath the threshold of Will’s conscious attention. At first, he can’t quite believe that someone as infallibly meticulous and precise as Dr. Lecter could have such an affliction. After all, the man is a polyglot, artist, musician, athlete, chef, surgeon, scholar, and has God knows how many other areas of expertise from the honorable to the unspeakable—but properly pronouncing sibilants is beyond his abilities? For such an extraordinary person, a lisp seems like such a mundane flaw. So normal. So…human.
Although Will may have trouble comprehending the existence of this lisp, he has no problem detecting it. Now that he’s noticed it, he can clearly hear Hannibal hiss and whistle his way through words both simple and complex: palace, Renaissance, transform, dissection, see, Hobbs, professional curiosity, ethics and aesthetics, choice of friends, person suit.
The impediment comes and goes, waxes and wanes: sometimes he’s able to successfully execute a snare of a word like restlessness, but then, in his very next sentence, the delicate sounds dash themselves upon the shore of his lips. What should be a sharp, crisp fricative gets softened and blurred at some point during its passage through his vocal tract. The word chess may come out sounding like chesh, or possibly cheth, or is it more like chezh? Will isn’t entirely sure what the defect is or where exactly Hannibal’s pronunciation is going awry. It’s almost as if Hannibal’s mouth wants every S-sound to be diffused into a cloudy haze like the foggy phonemes in vision, mirage, or (Will recalls with bitterness) seizure.
It’s enough to make Will start to question his own hearing. He’s not even convinced that it’s a true error and not merely a feature of Hannibal’s accent, that primarily Baltic amalgam fused with several other unidentifiable influences acquired throughout his travels. Or perhaps it’s an effect of his grandiose vocabulary, which is medically-informed, academically-tinged, and more extensive than Will’s despite the fact that English must be at least his sixth or seventh language.
Whatever its origin, whatever its particulars, the lisp fascinates Will. He fixates on it despite Hannibal possessing many other compelling features that should compete for his attention. He sometimes feels a bizarre compulsion to point out the lisp, perhaps even to mock or imitate it, just to knock Hannibal down a peg, to show him that he does in fact have imperfections and they are indeed perceptible to others. But, of course, he resists the urge.
The real problem, the horrible truth, is that the supposed flaw is quite endearing. Like his gaudy fashion sense or his absurdly pretentious hobbies, Hannibal somehow manages to make the insufferable charming. There’s nothing more infuriating than to realize that his imperfections only make him more perfect.
Occasionally, while in the middle of a session, Will’s mind starts to disengage from the meaning behind his pseudo-therapist’s words and simply lets the swell of sound wash over him. Swayed by the gentle waves of Hannibal’s lilting cadence and his soft, even timbre, Will loses track of the lisp, of the conversation, of himself.
In these meditative moments, his focus shifts to observing Hannibal’s mouth at work: a site of consumption, a source of indulgence and horror, a graveyard full of headstones. And yet, the way he speaks is invariably polite, never letting slip a curse, never admitting to anything. His speech is clean, his words pre-sanitized.
Will studies the shape of his mouth, totally ordinary yet strikingly unique. Its neutral posture is a pursed pout with the top lip just overhanging the bottom, easy to mistake for a derisive sneer. From some angles, in some lights, his evenly pink lips seem to possess some kind of extra curve, as if sketched by an overzealous artist desperate to prove his skill. Their distinctive arches wrap themselves around his words, moving in exotic patterns that Will finds strange and hypnotic. Between them, Hannibal’s teeth flash intermittently. They are idiosyncratically aligned in a way deemed crooked by American standards but well cared for and healthy. With his jaw relaxed, the lateral incisors, long and slanted, peek out from glistening gums; with a smile, they appear honed and carnivorous.
Will catalogues all these facts and more relating to Hannibal’s speech, his inflection and resonance, his breath, his tongue, the subtle valley of his philtrum, the graceful arcs of his nasolabial lines, the shadows bleeding from the seam of his lips, the follicles ripe with stubble lying in wait just beneath the surface of his skin like a predator poised for an ambush.
As Will watches, he feels a stab of pleasure, which leads in turn to a surge of shame. He clamps down on his emotions to prevent the creation of a potential feedback loop that could easily turn the shame right back into pleasure.
Gradually, as time goes on, more intimate glimpses of vulnerability are revealed—irrefutable proof of the monster’s humanity. Will catalogues those, too. A muscle twitches in Hannibal’s cheek. He misspeaks (“exaggerated” when he meant “exasperated”). He even hiccups, for God’s sake. It’s unbelievable. The man might actually be mortal after all.
Will watches how the pliant tissue inside Hannibal’s mouth yields to the scrape of the investigator’s careful cotton swab as it swipes a DNA sample from those stolen cells.
He watches how Hannibal takes measured bites of his food and chews thoroughly. How the modest bulge of his larynx leaps and bobs when he swallows.
How the tendons in his jaw flex as his cheeks hollow and stretch.
How he gasps in surprise, clenches against pain, and sighs in pleasure.
How soft his mouth feels and how delicious it tastes.
